The Snowman (2 page)

As Sara approached the garage she saw that almost forty minutes had passed.

He had promised to ring now and then. He had always been a good liar, and for once she was glad. Even before she got to the car she saw her son’s pale face staring at her from the back seat. She pulled at the door and found to her astonishment that it was locked. She peered in at him through steamed-up windows. He only opened it when she knocked on the glass.

She sat in the driver’s seat. The radio was silent and it was ice-cold inside. The key was on the passenger seat. She turned to him. Her son was pale, and his lower lip was trembling.

‘Is there anything wrong?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I saw him.’

There was a thin, shrill tone of horror in his voice that she couldn’t recall hearing since he was a little boy jammed between them on the sofa in front of the TV with his hands over his eyes. And now his voice was changing, he had stopped giving her a goodnight hug and had started being interested in car engines and girls. And one day he would get in a car with one of them and also leave her.

‘What do you mean?’ she said, inserting the key in the ignition and turning.

‘The snowman . . .’

There was no response from the engine and panic gripped her without warning. Quite what she was afraid of, she didn’t know. She stared out of the windscreen and turned the key again. Had the battery died?

‘And what did the snowman look like?’ she asked, pressing the accelerator to the floor and desperately turning the key so hard it felt as though she would break it. He answered, but his answer was drowned by the roar of the engine.

Sara put the car in gear and let go of the clutch as if in a sudden hurry to get away. The wheels spun in the soft, slushy snow. She accelerated harder, but the rear of the car slid sideways. By then the tyres had spun their way down to the tarmac and they lurched forward and skidded into the road.

‘Dad’s waiting for us,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to get a move on.’

She switched on the radio and turned up the volume to fill the cold interior with sounds other than her own voice. A newsreader said for the hundredth time today that last night Ronald Reagan had beaten Jimmy Carter in the American election.

The boy said something again, and she glanced in the mirror.

‘What did you say?’ she said in a loud voice.

He repeated it, but still she couldn’t hear. She turned down the radio while heading towards the main road and the river, which ran through the countryside like two mournful black stripes. And gave a start when she realised he had leaned forward between the two front seats. His voice sounded like a dry whisper in her ear. As if it was important no one else heard them.

‘We’re going to die.’

2

2 NOVEMBER 2004. DAY 1.

Pebble-Eyes.

H
ARRY
H
OLE GAVE A START AND OPENED HIS EYES WIDE
. It was freezing cold, and from the dark came the sound of the voice that had awoken him. It announced that the American people would decide today whether their President for the next four years would again be George Walker Bush. November. Harry was thinking they were definitely heading for dark times. He threw off the duvet and placed his feet on the floor. The lino was so cold it stung. He left the news blaring from the radio alarm clock and went into the bathroom. Regarded himself in the mirror. November there, too: drawn, greyish pale and overcast. As usual his eyes were bloodshot, and the pores on his nose large, black craters. The bags under his eyes with their light blue, alcohol-washed irises would disappear after his face had been ministered to with hot water, a towel and breakfast. He assumed they would, that is. Harry was not sure exactly how his face would fare during the day now that he had turned forty. Whether the wrinkles would be ironed out and peace would fall over the hunted expression he woke with after nights of being ridden by nightmares. Which was most nights. For he avoided mirrors after he left his small, spartan flat in Sofies gate to become Inspector Hole of the Crime Squad at Oslo Police HQ. Then he stared into others’ faces to find their pain, their Achilles heels, their nightmares, motives and reasons for self-deception, listening to their fatiguing lies and trying to find a meaning in what he did: imprisoning people who were already imprisoned inside themselves. Prisons of hatred and self-contempt he recognised all too well. He ran a hand over the shorn bristles of blond hair that grew precisely 192 centimetres above the frozen soles of his feet. His collarbone stood out under his skin like a clothes hanger. He had trained a lot since the last case. In a frenzy, some maintained. As well as cycling he had started to lift weights in the fitness room in the bowels of Police HQ. He liked the burning pain, and the repressed thoughts. Nevertheless, he just became leaner. The fat disappeared and his muscles were layered between skin and bone. And while before he had been broad-shouldered and what Rakel called a natural athlete, now he had begun to resemble the photograph he had once seen of a skinned polar bear: a muscular, but shockingly gaunt, predator. Quite simply, he was fading away. Not that it actually mattered. Harry sighed. November. It was going to get even darker.

He went into the kitchen, drank a glass of water to relieve his headache and peered through the window in surprise. The roof of the block on the other side of Sofies gate was white and the bright reflected light made his eyes smart. The first snow had come in the night. He thought of the letter. He did occasionally get such letters, but this one had been special. It had mentioned Toowoomba.

On the radio a nature programme had started and an enthusiastic voice was waxing lyrical about seals. ‘Every summer Berhaus seals collect in the Bering Straits to mate. Since the males are in the majority, the competition for females is so fierce that those males which have managed to procure themselves a female will stick with her during the whole of the breeding period. The male will take care of his partner until the young have been born and can cope by themselves. Not out of love for the female, but out of love for his own genes and hereditary material. Darwinist theory would say that it is natural selection that makes the Berhaus seal monogamous, not morality.’

I wonder, thought Harry.

The voice on the radio was almost hitting falsetto with excitement. ‘But before the seals leave the Bering Straits to search for food in the open sea, the male will try to kill the female. Why? Because a female Berhaus seal will never mate twice with the same male! For her this is about spreading the biological risk of hereditary material, just like on the stock market. For her it makes biological sense to be promiscuous, and the male knows this. By taking her life he wants to stop the young of other seals competing with his own progeny for the same food.’

‘We’re entering Darwinian waters here, so why don’t humans think like the seal?’ another voice said.

‘But we do, don’t we! Our society is not as monogamous as it appears, and never has been. A Swedish study showed recently that between fifteen and twenty per cent of all children born have a different father from the one they – and for that matter the postulated fathers – think. Twenty per cent! That’s every fifth child! Living a lie. And ensuring biological diversity.’

Harry fiddled with the frequency dial to find some tolerable music. He stopped at an ageing Johnny Cash’s version of ‘Desperado’.

There was a firm knock on the door.

Harry went into the bedroom, put on his jeans, returned to the hall and opened up.

‘Harry Hole?’ The man outside was wearing a blue boiler suit and looking at Harry through thick lenses. His eyes were as clear as a child’s.

Harry nodded.

‘Have you got fungus?’ The man asked the question with a straight face. A long wisp of hair traversed his forehead and was stuck there. Under his arm he was holding a plastic clipboard with a densely printed sheet.

Harry waited for him to explain further, but nothing was forthcoming. Just this clear, open expression.

‘That,’ Harry said, ‘strictly speaking, is a private matter.’

The man gave the suggestion of a smile in response to a joke he was heartily sick of hearing. ‘Fungus in your flat. Mould.’

‘I have no reason to believe that I have,’ said Harry.

‘That’s the thing about mould. It seldom gives anyone any reason to believe that it’s there.’ The man sucked at his teeth and rocked on his heels.

‘But?’ Harry said at length.

‘But it is.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘Your neighbour’s got it.’

‘Uh-huh? And you think it may have spread?’

‘Mould doesn’t spread. Dry rot does.’

‘So then . . . ?’

‘There’s a construction fault with the ventilation along the walls in this block. It allows dry rot to flourish. May I take a peep at your kitchen?’

Harry stepped to the side. The man powered into the kitchen where at once he pressed an orange hairdryer-like apparatus against the wall. It squeaked twice.

‘Damp detector,’ the man said, studying something that was obviously an indicator. ‘Just as I thought. Sure you haven’t seen or smelt anything suspicious?’

Harry didn’t have a clear perception of what that might be.

‘A coating like on stale bread,’ the man said. ‘Mouldy smell.’

Harry shook his head.

‘Have you had sore eyes?’ the man asked. ‘Felt tired? Had headaches?’

Harry shrugged. ‘Of course. For as long as I can remember.’

‘Do you mean for as long as you’ve lived here?’

‘Maybe. Listen . . .’

But the man wasn’t listening; he’d taken a knife from his belt. Harry stood back and watched the hand holding the knife being raised and thrust with great force. There was a sound like a groan as the knife went through the plasterboard behind the wallpaper. The man pulled out the knife, thrust it in again and bent back a powdery piece of plaster, leaving a large gap in the wall. Then he whipped out a small penlight and shone it into the cavity. A deep frown developed behind his oversized glasses. Then he stuck his nose deep into the cavity and sniffed.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Hello there, boys.’

‘Hello there who?’ Harry asked, edging closer.

‘
Aspergillus
,’ said the man. ‘A genus of mould. We have three or four hundred types to choose between and it’s difficult to say which one this is because the growth on these hard surfaces is so thin it’s invisible. But there’s no mistaking the smell.’

‘That means trouble, right?’ Harry asked, trying to remember how much he had left in his bank account after he and his father had sponsored a trip to Spain for Sis, his little sister who had what she referred to as ‘a touch of Down’s syndrome’.

‘It’s not like real dry rot. The block won’t collapse,’ the man said. ‘But you might.’

‘Me?’

‘If you’re prone to it. Some people get ill from breathing the same air as the mould. They’re ailing for years, and of course they get accused of being hypochondriacs since no one can find anything and the other residents are fine. And then the pest eats up the wallpaper and the plasterboard.’

‘Mm. What do you suggest?’

‘That I eradicate the infection, of course.’

‘And my personal finances while you’re at it?’

‘Covered by the building’s insurance, so it won’t cost you a krone. All I need is access to the flat for the next few days.’

Harry found the spare set of keys in the kitchen drawer and passed them to him.

‘It’ll just be me,’ the man said. ‘I should mention that in passing. Lots of strange things going on out there.’

‘Are there?’ Harry smiled sadly, staring out of the window.

‘Eh?’

‘Nothing,’ Harry said. ‘There’s nothing to steal here anyway. I’ll be off now.’

The low morning sun sparkled off all the glass on Oslo Police HQ, standing there as it had for the last thirty years, on the summit of the ridge by the main street, Grønlandsleiret. From there the police were – although this had not been exactly intentional – near to the high crime areas in east Oslo, and the prison, located on the site of the old brewery, was its closest neighbour. The police station was surrounded by a brown, withering lawn and maple and linden trees which had been covered with a thin layer of grey-white snow during the night, making the park look like a deceased’s shrouded chattels.

Harry walked up the black strip of tarmac to the main entrance and entered the central hall where Kari Christensen’s porcelain wall decoration with running water whispered its eternal secrets. He nodded to the security guard in reception and went up to Crime Squad on the sixth floor. Although it was almost six months since he had been given his new office in the red zone, he often went to the cramped, windowless one he had shared with Police Officer Jack Halvorsen. Now Magnus Skarre was in there. And Jack Halvorsen had been interred in the ground of Vestre Aker Cemetery. At first the parents had wanted their son to be buried in their home town, Steinkjer, as Jack and Beate Lønn, the head of Krimteknisk, the Forensics Unit, had not been married; they hadn’t even been living together. But when they found out that Beate was pregnant and Jack’s baby would be born in the summer, they agreed that Jack’s grave should be in Oslo.

Harry entered his new office. Which he knew would be known as that for ever, the way the fifty-year-old home ground of Barcelona football club was still called Camp Nou, Catalan for new stadium. He dropped onto his chair, switched on the radio, and nodded good morning to the photos perched on the bookcase and propped against the wall. One day in an uncertain future, if he remembered to buy picture pins, they would hang on the wall. Ellen Gjelten and Jack Halvorsen and Bjarne Møller. There they stood in chronological order. The Dead Policemen’s Society.

On the radio Norwegian politicians and social scientists were giving their views on the American presidential election. Harry recognised the voice of Arve Støp, the owner of the successful magazine
Liberal
and famous for being one of the most knowledgeable, arrogant and entertaining opinion-formers in the country. Harry turned up the volume until the voices bounced off the brick walls, and grabbed his Peerless handcuffs lying on the new desk. He practised speed-cuffing on the table leg, which was already splintered as a result of this bad habit he had picked up on the FBI course in Chicago and perfected during lonely evenings in a lousy bedsit in Cabrini Green, to the screams of rowing neighbours and in the company of Jim Beam. The aim was to bang the cuffs against the arrestee’s wrist in such a way that the spring-loaded arm closed around the wrist and the lock clicked on the other side. With the right amount of force and accuracy you could cuff yourself to an arrestee in one simple movement before he had a chance to react. Harry had never had any use for this on the job and only once for the other thing he had learned over there: how to catch a serial killer. The cuffs clicked around the table leg and the radio voices droned on.